Month: January 2011

I went last night to the Southern to check out Jolie Holland‘s show, and was forced to reflect on a question I’ve pondered many times: Can a human being truly come out of the womb speaking fine, but singing like her tongue is competing with marbles for space in her mouth?

If you haven’t seen her, Holland is a great, understated performer. She sings in a limber, jazzy voice with a slow attack that melts the edges of her words. (In that way, she is the opposite of Metallica’s James Hetfield, who punctuates each line with a "gah" that sounds like he’s trying to chomp the words as they escape his mouth.) When she hits the hook of her catchiest song, "Mexico City," she sings, "Oh, limmy-a-longah-day," in which the words are supposedly, "The living and the dead." And too bad for marketing purposes, that’s the name of her new record, which I plan to buy after seeing her.

Exhibit A: Jolie Holland’s "Mexico City." More below.

But not without struggling with it. My frustration is this: For some musicians, singing in a difficult voice has a way of coding one’s music as "difficult"—perhaps more difficult than it really is. To wit, Holland said that she recorded that record after falling in love with some of the best, most difficult music pop music that exists, that of Daniel Johnston. If you invent a funny way to sing, your music doesn’t have to do the heavy lifting.

Maybe Bob Dylan had "difficult" in mind when he abandoned singing through his throat (which he later picked up again on Nashville Skyline) to spend his early years singing like a Dust Bowl balladeer whose nose was packed with dust. Or Tom Waits, who turned the somewhat gritty croon of his youth into a low-down growl (with the help of cigarettes). And all the way from David Byrne, who sings like a robot on acid, to the guy from momentary indie success story Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, which, I mean—that was taking the whole thing too far.

Exhibit B: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Masquerading as "difficult"?

 While watching Jolie Holland mumble her phrases in that stirring voice, I came to reflect on my own music. (Forgive me for a moment.) Just as Holland is guilty of singing with a leaden tongue, I’m guilty of mumbling my words, burying them deep in the mix—something I picked up while listening to My Bloody Valentine as an impressionable youth. But when I’m singing in my particular way, what feels "authentic" to me likely comes across as put-on.

So it seems, as in so often the case with art, the concept of "authenticity" is a chimera. It struck me not as strange or annoying when the Washington indie rocker Arrington de Dionyso brought his throat singing act (a style apparently indigenous to the Tuva people of Siberia) Malaikat dan Singa to the Tea Bazaar last year. Instead, it struck me as awesome.

Maybe the human voice doesn’t sound any one way. People sing in their vernacular. Maybe Holland listened to a lot of folk music underwater.

Exhibit C: Arrington de Dionyso’s Malaikat dan Singa "Mani Malaikat," brutally dismantling sentimental notions about authentic vocal stylings.

Who else adopts a strong vocal affect?

There is nothing pretty about scoring just forty-two points in the modern era of college basketball. No Dean Smith out there running his sickening, Carolina-blue, four-corner spread offense. Not even an opposing pair of menacing seven-footers swatting away all of Virginia’s shots.

Just bad, uninspiring, wretched basketball, plain and damn simple.

Virginia’s Assane Sene grabbed a career-high fifteen rebounds, but he also was credited with six costly turnovers in the loss. Mustapha Farrakhan, and Joe Harris led the Hoos with eight points each.

Maryland was on fire at times in this game, and finished the contest 7-15 from three-point-land, while the Hoos were just 4-17 from beyond the arch. The Terps were led by Adrian Bowie who had a season-high twenty-two points.

Tony Bennett’s Wahoos committed fifteen turnovers, to Maryland’s eleven in what was one sloppy, ugly hoops game. Virginia shot a pitiful 33.3% for the game, as Maryland shot an incredible 68% in the second half.

Yikes, at least National Football Signing Day is right around the corner, right?

Hoos fans, listen in tomorrow from 3-6 p.m as I sit in as guest host for Mac McDonald’s (almost) statewide radio show. Locally the show is available on WKAV (1400 AM), also on WLEE (990 AM) in Richmond, WHBG (1360 AM) in Harrisonburg, and WREL (1450 AM) in Lexington. Go Hoos! 

In July, C-VILLE reported that the Jefferson Park Avenue (JPA) Bridge—making drivers and pedestrians slightly nervous since 2007—was headed towards a 16-month, $10.5 million renovation. Now, according to Charlottesville Tomorrow, construction will be quicker and cheaper than previously reported, with a projected March 2012 completion date and a construction bid awarded to a Lexington, Kentucky-based company that will do the job for $5.8 million.

However, a quick road to a renovated JPA Bridge may slow progress on a similar project: a Belmont Bridge renovation. Money set aside for the Belmont Bridge—approximately $1.2 million of the $5.3 million set aside—will be used to fund the JPA Bridge renovation. Projections for the Belmont Bridge renovation put construction costs at $9.2 million.

Is one bridge renovation more pressing than the other? Weigh in below!

Bike advocates may not be too pleased with the General Assembly’s Transportation Subcommittee. Today, Delegate David Toscano’s House Bill 1683—which proposed a 3′ minimum passing distance between a car and a bike, up from 2’—was tabled by a vote.

Current law states that any driver overtaking a bicycle traveling in the same direction "shall pass at a reasonable speed at least two feet." That law was questioned last year, after a UVA graduate student died as a result of a collision with a city utility truck at the intersection of West Main and Fourth streets. To read more about the response to the accident, click here and here.
 

In late 2009, Orange County supervisors approved a special use permit for a proposed Walmart on 55 acres of land located near the 2,774-acre Wilderness Battlefield. Last March, a spokesperson for Friends of the Wilderness Battlefield—which filed a civil suit against Orange County supervisors to prevent the store’s construction—told C-VILLE that preservationists can’t easily relocate a battlefield.

"They can relocate a building that hasn’t even broken ground yet," she said.

Ultimately, that may be the path Walmart takes. This morning, representatives for the store told an Orange County Circuit Court that Walmart would no longer pursue the special use permit for the site, according to reports. According to the Culpeper Star-Exponent, Walmart will hold and preserve the land, but not develop it.

Stay tuned to c-ville.com for more as the story develops. And, to see how Walmart and Wilderness made their way to the courtroom, click here.

I haven’t felt this cheered by a headline since Biscuit Run suddenly turned from a development-to-be into a future state park. Walmart is not building on the Wilderness battlefield after all! Sound the bugles!

Development marches on, but it feels good to know that this site will not go under the bulldozers, will not be paved, will not host the buying and selling of out-of-state produce and out-of-country plastic doodads.

That’ll all be happening somewhere else along the Rt. 3 corridor, according to Walmart’s new plans. In the end, it may be a wash environmentally. (Plenty of Orange County citizens were, in fact, outspokenly in favor of a Walmart, so it seems their wishes will be honored.)

But I’m glad to see that it’s possible for the community to take notice of a piece of land and speak out loudly enough, for long enough, to turn away development there. In this case, it was history that provided the rallying cry. In another case, it might be a more ecological concern.

Interestingly, Walmart still plans to buy the site. It’ll be intriguing to keep an eye on what they do with it, if anything. State park?

Congratulations to equal opportunity beard enthusiast Liam Buckley, who answered our call for best beard of all with this classic:

——-

I just got off the horn with Southern owner Andy Gems, and it looks like tonight’s Kyp Malone and Jolie Holland show is still on. Which means that if you live in the Downtown area (or if you can still make it Downtown, in spite of the weather) you’re in luck: There’s a great show to attend! And you can do it for free.

How? On the Arts Picks page of this week’s C-VILLE, we’ve got a big picture of ol’ Kyp, and it made me wonder: Who in the world has a bigger beard than Mr. Rain Machine? I’ll turn the mike over to you. He or she who finds a picture of the most impressive beard and posts a link to it in the comments section of this blog post wins a pair of free tickets to tonight’s show.

Results to come at 5pm.

Beat this: Kyp Malone is at the Southern tonight with Jolie Holland.

Jolie Holland’s hit "Mexico City"

Your go, Charlottesville.

You must have weather, whether you like it or not. School, however, doesn’t necessarily follow the same rules. In preparation for anywhere from 5" to 10" of snow, Albemarle County Public Schools have dismissed all students for the day, and cancelled all extracurricular activities. Charlottesville High School has also dismissed students, but city elementary and middle schools remain on a normal operating schedule. For those of you with students in area private schools, check the appropriate website; a cursory glance shows that St. Anne’s-Belfield and Covenant have dismissed students and cancelled extracurriculars. PVCC and UVA have also cancelled classes.

Additionally, a joint city-county-UVA workshop scheduled for this evening at the Albemarle County Office Building, "Carbon, Our Energy Future, and You," will be rescheduled at a later date. If you know of any additional weather-related closings, post them below. And play nice.

Amid all the rumors and untruths that obscure the true story of Bob Dylan, experts and Dylan himself agree agree that the young, curly-haired songwriter born Bob Zimmerman first came to New York on January 24, 1961—which is, as the Village Voice notes, exactly 50 years ago today. (All week at the Sound of the City blog they’ll post a trove of Bob-related materials.) That winter was apparently the coldest in decades, but it wasn’t enough to faze the recent University of Minnesota dropout, who quickly made his way to the Café Wha? and secured a spot playing harmonica with Fred Neil.

The Voice’s blog has a picture of Dylan performing, a couple of weeks after getting to town, with a heartbreaking young banjo player and blues singer named Karen Dalton, and Neil, whose hit "Everybody’s Talkin’" Harry Nilsson would later make eternally famous. And so the story goes, after applying some elbow grease and fine-tuning his Guthrie-indebted backwater affectation, Bob Dylan became Bob Dylan. With all of these fame-bound folks around, something, it seems, was in the water.

The Bob Dylan story—the whole Greenwich Village in the 1960s thing—has done much to convince young artists of today that moving to a big city (and for Charlottesvillians, that city in particular) is an essential step toward greatness. For networking, perhaps. No New York probably would’ve meant no Albert Grossman for Dylan; and the Brill Building sure ain’t in Charlottesville. But when thinking about the "scenes" of yore, from whence many a famous person came, I often return to a book that doesn’t have much to do with art per se: Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy, a great book about what small communities can do.

McKibben notes that historically, that those communities that breed greatness—for lack of a better word—were cut "closer to the human measure." The Florence of Boticelli and Michelangelo had a bite-sized population (by today’s standards) of 40,000. It was when Boston and New York had populations of about 18,000 and 33,000, respectively, that they produced "Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison and Franklin roughly at the same time." (Read more here.)

He also notes that communities take many different shapes and sizes. The Greenwich Village of the early 1960s took one shape and one size, perhaps a small group in a huge sampling, and housed the brightest minds of a generation. The brightest of those may be Dylan’s. But as the Village Voice celebrates one of its city’s success stories, it’s worth asking: Would lightning have struck Dylan’s hometown of Duluth, Minnesota (today’s pop. 85,000), had he stayed there?

New York or bust?

Bob Dylan, "Talkin’ New York" Gerde’s Folk City, New York, April 1962

Karen Dalton’s "Something on Your Mind"